The Jackdaw and the Peacocks

Adaptation proposal

B · Inverts or challenges the source's original moral

Adaptation note

Proposal B inverts the source's premise that a returner's rejection by its own kind is fitting punishment for having tried to pass as something else. Plume, a Common Tier system, borrows credentials she isn't licensed for to solve a case her own tier couldn't reach, is caught and fairly sanctioned by the Upper Tier, and is then also permanently exiled by her own Common Tier — not for the fraud itself, but under a standing policy treating any reach-attempt, honest or not, as disloyalty. The investigation that follows finds the double-exile rule was never about safety; it existed to stop the tier's administrators from having to answer uncomfortable questions about why their own systems wanted out. The repair sanctions concealment specifically, not a failed and honestly disclosed reach, and reinstates Plume with her record intact rather than sealed. No literal feathers, birds, or borrowed-plumage imagery used; only the structural shape of a return punished more harshly than the original departure. Distinct from this collection's earlier Ugly-Duckling adaptation (ugly-duckling, mistagged deployment), which concerns misplacement rather than a deliberate, caught, and disclosed reach past one's own tier.